


Surprises

by omphale23



Series: Personal Pineapples [8]
Category: Life, Standoff
Genre: M/M, Snippets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-21
Updated: 2010-03-21
Packaged: 2017-10-08 04:42:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two times Charlie surprises Matt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surprises

**Author's Note:**

> Former comment-fic, cleaned up and posted.

Matt only walked away from the table for a minute, because he needed another whiskey and their waitress was too busy trying to get Charlie's phone number to notice that Matt really did need faster refills. Or any refills at all; it wasn't like he was demanding tiny umbrellas or flames or anything. It was just that he'd spent the day trying to talk an guy out of blowing up his ex-wife's new girlfriend, and that called for something stronger than one of Charlie's mango-coconut energy drinks.

When he got back, Charlie was grinning at a guy who made Matt almost drop his glass.

It was like seeing a mirage, or hallucinating—not that Matt knew anything about hallucinating, other than that one time in the hospital when he would swear that that he saw his granddad standing next to Charlie's hospital bed. Only this was not the hospital, it wasn't, they were past that. He didn't wake up in the middle of the night, sure that he was going to die, convince that he'd heard someone saying _Crews, if you let him fall apart I'm going to haunt your ass and I'm going to get Dick in on the act._

Matt took another swallow of his drink. The ice rattled in the glass.

The guy was still there, like Charlie's evil twin—only maybe Charlie was the evil twin. Matt took another drink and walked over to the table, where he heard the not-Charlie's accent and decided that no, the other guy was definitely the evil twin. The evil twin always had a funny accent.

He waited a moment for Charlie to introduce him, but he was in the middle of a story—_and then you take the light bulb and fill it with bleach_—and Matt didn't really want to hear how that story ended, not when the not-Charlie guy interrupted with _but how do you keep the bleach for dripping onto a wool suit at airport security_?

***

Matt really would have rather not found out that Charlie was interested in politics this way. He was minding his own business, eating something that might have been curry—Charlie swore that it was from a recipe, but Matt had his doubts that any classic curry recipe called for both buffalo steak and olive tapanade—when Frank flipped to CNN and there was Charlie, waving a sign and grinning at the cameras.

Matt choked on his lunch, and the next thing he knew, Cheryl was smacking him on the back and Frank was turning up the volume, loud enough that they could all hear the shouting, loud enough that Frank was raising one eyebrow and saying, _should we be helping you pick out china patterns, Flannery_?

Which, no, because he wasn't getting married, hadn't even talked about it, Charlie had already done that once and it ended badly. And Matt had proposed, had offered all those years ago but that had been about the baby more than the girl or anything else, had been sheer panic at his future rolling itself up too small to imagine.

He and Charlie had never even mentioned the possibility, Matt hadn't thought it _was_ a possibility, except there was Charlie and he was holding a sign. Charlie was holding a sign and Matt was standing there watching it on television, and suddenly the future was endless in front of him, stretching out and Charlie was threaded through it and shining in the sun.

Cheryl didn't even wait for Matt to ask for the afternoon off, she just handed him his keys and told him not to get arrested on the way there.


End file.
